Ezra Pound
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4.2 Ezra Pound
Ronnie Apter
(Central Michigan University)
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) declared, ‘A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations; or follows it’ (‘Notes on Elizabethan Classicists’ p. 232). He was right. And, aided by his own gifts as a poet, he helped make the latter half of the twentieth century a period of great translation. When he began translating and writing about translation in the 1910s, the translation of older poetry into English was dominated by the use of Wardour Street, a pseudo-archaic me´lange of modern English and archaisms from any of Wve centuries, which Rossetti, Swinburne, and lesser lights had made popular. Words like ‘hath’ and ‘methinks’ were meant to indicate the age of the source text. In the hands of good poets like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne, the method produced glamorously romantic translations. Those less adept produced translations which made the great poets of the past sound all alike and equally irrelevant to the present. Pound is remembered as the translator and theorist who put paid to that tradition. His letters and essays usually urged translation into fully modern English and advocated free verse as an English equivalent to quantitative or syllabic verse (see ‘Cavalcanti’). His enormously inXuential translations from Chinese in Cathay, such as ‘South Folk in Cold Country’ (see below) taught translators how to use a neutral modern, semi-formal diction to convey a simultaneous sense of antiquity and timelessness. His correspondence with W. H. D. Rouse (see below), a prose translator of the Odyssey, again and again urges Rouse to Wnd the modern phrase, the living idiom.
Yet, strangely enough, Pound himself rarely translated older poetry without incorporating some form of archaizing. One of his great translations, ‘The Seafarer’ (see below), uses Wardour Street with the best of them. At the same time, it uses a highly original form of free verse to express the movement of the Anglo-Saxon: a roughly four-stress line, low in unstressed syllables, with much alliteration. The power and Xexibility of this form has inXuenced most subsequent translation of Old English. In still other translations, Pound experimented with using a speciWc earlier period of English (see the translations at the end of ‘Cavalcanti’), or with mixing diVerent periods on purpose, each locution being intended to call to mind the Weltanschauung of its particular time, in an attempt to convey ideas not available to modern English (see ‘How to Read,’ section on Logopoeia).
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Against the anti-translation attitude still all too prevalent (‘Poetry is what is lost in translation’), Pound advocated respect for the English tradition of translation, calling attention particularly to the beauties of Elizabethan translation: Golding’s Metamorphoses, Gavin Douglas’s Aeneid, and Marlowe’s Eclogues from Ovid (see ‘Translators of Greek’). He pointed out that Elizabethans saw earlier literature, not as a set of words to be faithfully reproduced, but as a set of ideas to be absorbed and refashioned. He set about following their lead himself to outraged howls about his lack of literality. Canto 1, for instance, translates not the Odyssey, but a 1538 translation of it into Latin by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus (see below). Moreover, Pound’s verse form for the translation is the roughly four-stress, alliterative free verse he had earlier invented for his translation of ‘The Seafarer’. That translation chain shades into his own poem. Few translators or critics accept Pound’s Elizabethan approach, yet many cannot but admire the verve of his translations, and accept that somehow, for all his errors and ‘errors,’ he has come closer to the spirit of the originals than many a careful classicist.
For Pound, translation is a form of criticism (see ‘Date Line’), its purpose for readers to point out and make accessible works of importance; its purpose for writers to help them, in their struggle to match the voice of another, to Wnd their own.
From ‘Notes on Elizabethan Classicists’, in Literary Essays, ed. and introd. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 227–48 (First published as ‘Elizabethan Classicists’,
The Egoist, 4. 8–10 (1917) and 5. 1 (1918) )
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations; or follows it. The Victorians in lesser degree had FitzGerald, and Swinburne’s Villon, and Rossetti. One is at Wrst a little surprised at the importance which historians of Spanish poetry give to Boscan, but our histories give our own translators too little. And worse, we have long since fallen under the blight of the Miltonic or noise tradition, to a stilted dialect in translating the classics, a dialect which imitates the idiom of the ancients rather than seeking their meaning, a state of mind which aims at ‘teaching the boy his Latin’ or Greek or whatever it may be, but has long since ceased to care for the beauty of the original; or which perhaps thinks ‘appreciation’ obligatory, and the meaning and content mere accessories. (232)
Or is a Wne poet ever translated until another his equal invents a new style in a later language? Can we, for our part, know our Ovid until we Wnd him in Golding? Is there one of us so good at his Latin, and so ready in imagination that Golding will not throw upon his mind shades and glamours inherent in the original text which had for all that escaped him? Is any foreign speech ever our own, ever so full of beauty as our lingua materna (whatever lingua materna that may be)? Or is not a new beauty created, an old beauty doubled when the overchange is well done? (235)
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From ‘Cavalcanti’, in Literary Essays, 149–200 (Wrst published in Make It New
(1934) )
As to the use of canzoni in English, whether for composition or in translation: it is not that there aren’t rhymes in English; or enough rhymes or even enough two-syllable rhymes, but that the English two-syllable rhymes are of the wrong timbre and weight. They have extra consonants at the end, as in Xowing and going ; or they go squashy; or they XuV up as in snowy and goeth. They are not rime agute ; they do not oVer readily the qualities and contrasts that Dante has discussed so ably in De Eloquio.
Even so, it is not that one ‘cannot’ use them but that they demand at times, sacriWce of values that had not come into being and were therefore not missed in Limoges, A.D. 1200. Against which we have our concealed rhymes and our semi-submerged alliteration. (En passant, the alliteration in Guido’s canzone is almost as marked as the rhyming though it enters as free component.)
It is not that one language cannot be made to do what another has done, but that it is not always expeditious to approach the same goal by the same alley. I do not think rhyme-aesthetic, any rhyme-aesthetic, can ever do as much damage to English verse as that done by latinization, in Milton’s time and before. The rhyme pattern is, after all, a matter of chiselling, and a question of the lima amorosa, whereas latinization is a matter or compost, and in the very substance of the speech. By latinization I mean here the attempt to use an uninXected language as if it were an inXected one, i.e. as if each word had a little label or postscript telling the reader at once what part it takes in the sentence, and specifying its several relations. Not only does such usage—with remnants of Latin order—ruin the word order in English, but it shows a fundamental mis-comprehension of the organism of the language, and fundamental stupidity of this kind is bound to spread its eVects through the whole Wbre of a man’s writing.
Hendecasyllables
Another prevalent error is that of dealing with Italian hendecasyllables as if they were English ‘iambic pentameter’. One is told in college that Italian verse is not accentual but syllabic but I can’t remember anyone’s having ever presented the Anglo-American reader with a lucid discrimination between the two systems of measurement. (168–9)
As to the atrocities of my translation [of Guido’s canzone ‘Donna mi prega’], all that can be said in excuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, and committed with the aim of driving the reader’s perception further into the original than it would without them have penetrated. The melodic structure is properly indicated—and for the Wrst time—by my disposition of the Italian text, but even that Wrm indication of the rhyme and the articulation of the strophe does not stress all the properties of Guido’s triumph in sheer musicality. [ . . . ]
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I have not given an English ‘equivalent’ for the Donna mi Prega; at the utmost I have provided the reader, unfamiliar with old Italian, an instrument that may assist him in gauging some of the qualities of the original.
All this is not so unconnected with our own time as it might seem. Those writers to whom vers libre was a mere ‘runnin’ dahn th’ road’, videlicet escape, and who were impelled thereto by no inner need of, or curiosity concerning, the quantitative element in metric, having come to the end of that lurch, lurch back not into experiment with the canzone or any other unexplored form, but into the stock and trade sonnet. (pp. 172–3)
When I ‘translated’ Guido eighteen years ago [1912] I did not see Guido at all [ . . . ]. My perception was not obfuscated by Guido’s Italian, diYcult as it then was for me to
read. I was obfuscated by the Victorian language.
[ . . . ] I began by meaning merely to give prose translation so that the reader ignorant of Italian could see what the melodic original meant. It is, however, an illusion to suppose that more than one person in every 300,000 has the patience or the intelligence to read a foreign tongue for its sound, or even to read what are known to be the masterworks of foreign melody, in order to learn the qualities of that melody, or to see where one’s own falls short.
What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary—which I, let us hope, got rid of a few years later. You can’t go round this sort of thing. It takes six or eight years to get educated in one’s art, and another ten to get rid of that education.
Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in. [ . . . ]
Where both Rossetti and I went oV the rails was in taking an English sonnet as the equivalent for a sonnet in Italian. (pp. 193–4)
[Having noted the cultural inXuence of Italy on Elizabethan England, Pound asks:] What happens when you idly attempt to translate early Italian into English, unclogged by the Victorian era, freed from sonnet obsession, but trying merely to sing and to leave out the dull bits in the Italian, or the bits you don’t understand?
I oVer you a poem that ‘don’t matter’ [‘Madonna la vostra belta enfolio’]. [ . . . ] It is not very attractive: until one starts playing with the simplest English equivalent.
‘Lady thy beauty doth so mad mine eyes, Driving my heart to strife wherein he dies.’
[ . . . ]
The next line is rather a cliche´; the line after more or less lacking in interest. We pull up on:
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‘Whereby thou seest how fair thy beauty is To compass doom’.
That would be very nice, but it is hardly translation. [ . . . ]
My two lines take the opening and two and a half of the Italian, English more concise; and the octave gets too light for the sestet. Lighten the sestet.
‘So unto Pity must I cry Not for safety, but to die.
Cruel Death is now mine ease If that he thine envoy is.’
We are preserving one value of early Italian work, the cantabile; and we are losing another, that is, the speciWc weight. (pp. 195–6)
But by taking these Italian sonnets, which are not metrically the equivalent of the English sonnet, by sacriWcing, or losing, or simply not feeling and understanding their cogency, their sobriety, and by seeking simply that far from quickly or so-easily-as-it-looks attainable thing, the perfect melody, careless of exactitude of idea, or careless as to which profound and fundamental idea you, at that moment, utter, perhaps in precise enough phrases, by cutting away the apparently non-functioning phrases (whose appearance deceives) you Wnd yourself in the English seicento song-books.
Death has become melodious; sorrow is as serious as the nightingale’s, tombstones are shelves for the reception of rose-leaves. And there is, quite often, a Mozartian perfection of melody, a wisdom, almost perhaps an ultimate wisdom, deplorably lacking in guts. (p. 197) As second exercise, we may try the sonnet by Guido Orlando [‘Onde si move e donde nasce Amore’] which is supposed to have invited Cavalcanti’s Donna mi Prega.
‘Say what is Love, whence doth he start Through what be his courses bent Memory, substance, accident
A chance of eye or will of heart
Whence he state or madness leadeth
Burns he with consuming pain
Tell me, friend, on what he feedeth
How, where, and o’er whom doth he reign
Say what is Love, hath he a face
True form or vain similitude
Is the Love life, or is he death
Thou shouldst know for rumour saith:
Servant should know his master’s mood —
Oft art thou ta’en in his dwelling-place.’
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[ . . . ] there is no deception, I have invented nothing, I have given a verbal weight about equal to that of the original, and arrived at this equality by dropping a couple of syllables per line. [ . . . ]
There is no question of giving Guido in an English contemporary to himself, the ultimate Britons were at that date unbreeched, painted in woad, and grunting in an idiom far more diYcult for us to master than the Langue d’Oc of the Plantagenets or the Lingua di Si.
If, however, we reach back to pre-Elizabethan English, of a period when the writers were still intent on clarity and explicitness, still preferring them to magniloquence and the thundering phrase, our trial [translation of ‘Chi e` questa che vien, ch’ ogni uom la mira’, by Guido Cavalcanti], or mine at least, results in:
‘Who is she that comes, makyng turn every man’s eye And makyng the air to tremble with a bright clearenesse That leadeth with her Love, in such nearness
No man may proVer of speech more than a sigh?
Ah God, what she is like when her owne eye turneth, is
Fit for Amor to speake, for I cannot at all;
Such is her modesty, I would call
Every woman else but an useless uneasiness.
No one could ever tell all of her pleasauntness
In that every high noble vertu leaneth to herward,
So Beauty sheweth her forth as her Godhede;
Never before so high was our mind led,
Nor have we so much of heal as will aVord
That our mind may take her immediate in its embrace.’
The objections to such a method are: the doubt as to whether one has the right to take a serious poem and turn it into a mere exercise in quaintness; the ‘misrepresentation’ not of the poem’s antiquity, but of the proportionate feel of that antiquity, by which I mean that Guido’s thirteenth-century language is to twentieth-century Italian sense much less archaic than any fourteenth-, Wfteenth-, or early sixteenth-century English is for us. [ . . . ] And as [the fervour of the original] simply does not occur in English poetry in those centuries there is no ready-made verbal pigment for its objectiWcation.
In the long run the translator is in all probability impotent to do all of the work for the linguistically lazy reader. He can show where the treasure lies, he can guide the reader in choice of what tongue is to be studied. [ . . . ]
This refers to ‘interpretative translation’. The ‘other sort’, I mean in cases where the ‘translator’ is deWnitely making a new poem, falls simply in the domain of original writing, or if it does not it must be censured according to equal standards, and praised with some sort of just deduction, assessable only in the particular case. (198–200)